ID111 – Tuning memory usage on your Domino Server
This was a really good deep dive into memory management on the Domino server. I learned a lot of stuff which I didn’t know and will be able to head back to the office with some immediate ideas about performance tuning an application which we are having problems with at the moment.
The presenter did a really good job of explaining a complex area.
INV106 – Innovations in Search Technology
It’s always humbling when you see the blue sky sessions from IBM Research. This one covered where things are going with search technologies within the enterprise. For once consumer technology (i.e. Google et al) is leading the way in this area of technology, but the enterprise space is catching up. We have already seen the Google Desktop plugin for Lotus Notes but if this session is anything to go by we are going to see a lot of much cooler stuff. Rather than just searching for specific terms it’s beginning to be possible to look at the meaning behind a search and then direct the user to pages which contain what they are really looking for rather than the actual words or phrases they have typed.
The cool tools which we saw demo’d are called Dogear and TamNoon, well worth a look as they move towards the production world.
INV101 – Hannover and Beyond
This was really more of a marketing exercise than any good technical content, even so there was some useful stuff…
- There are already 3 million ND7 users
- There will be a Notes 7 Plugin for the Workplace Managed Client on Linux
- There will be a Notes 7.0.2 client for the Mac… that works on Tiger (10.4.4)… that works on Intel as well as PowerPC!
- Sametime 7.5 is actually based on Eclipse so it is extendable by developers
And what I suppose was the real point of the session is that everyone needs to be clear…
HANNOVER IS NOTES
I am not sure it could be any clearer than that. You will not need to do anything to your Notes / Domino applications for them to run in Hannover. My biggest worry had been that URL structures would alter, the guys in Meet the Developers assure me that is not the case. From an upgrade point of view, it will be no worse than 5 to 6 or 6 to 7.
That being said they are adding a whole pile of stuff into Hannover (this is where the blurring between Notes and Workplace begins in my view). Hannover will contain the Activity Explorer (or some version of it), a Document Management capability, support for Composite Applications (a la Websphere Portal), and most intriguingly a Java / Eclipse Development Environment.
This could (and it’s still early days) be an Outlook killer in terms of the UI, it does look really good.
ID102 – Domino 7 Server and Beyond
It’s strange but sometimes you don’t want really polished, slick presentations, it makes me feel happy when the true geeky stuff is hard going. This was just a barrage of information but you know that the quality is good and reliable because these are the guys that right the code down at the coal-face.
So some more bullet points (which seem to be turning into my theme for the week):
- A new feature being worked on is called "Resilient Views" that is views which can cope with a response heirarchy which has been broken (due to copying and pasting or document security). Doesn’t sound like much but it could be really useful.
- Mail Recall – this is one I don’t like, it encourages sloppiness in my view. But anyway it’s a new server feature for Domino Next.
- RSS and Atom feed generation is going to be made easier.
- Development are looking at removing the dependency that the server has on the NAB. That is allowing Domino to work with an LDAP directory instead of the NAB. Now that sounds cool, especially as they also mentioned virtualisation so that Notes apps still think the NAB is there.
- There will be native 64 bit support in the future but 32 bit will still be supported in the Domino Next timeframe. 64 bit versions of servers will be treated as new platforms in the same way that Linux or AIX etc have been.
CS104 – Reach out and Blog
After their success last year this was another panel session. To be honest there’s nothing new here but they are great fun. The panel was cracking: Rocky, Ed, Volker, Libby, Declan, Jack, Chris and for a brief period Julian are some of the most well known bloggers in the community and they provided great entertainment.
